During design and development of a hardware or software product, manufacturers put great effort to assure desired quality of the hardware or software product. The production validation (quality assurance) process involves various activities such as test plan and management, test execution, defect report or the like. Extensive testing is often completed on the products to assure performance and that the products meet industry standards for hardware, software, and BIOS compatibility.
It is easy for testers to conduct improper tests or waste valuable resources during a product validation process. For example, testers perform tests manually by interpreting a set of predetermined procedures and recording their results with as much detail as they feel necessary. However, a set of manually recorded instructions does not guarantee that another tester can accurately duplicate and consistently record the test results. Sometimes, testers waste time by repeating simple but time-consuming tasks, allowing for the introduction of error.
Multiple test groups may be involved in the production validation process when various customers desire different features in the product. However, when multiple test groups service different customers, they hardly communicate with each other. Conventionally, each group maintains its own test results and procedures. Thus, the lack of shared knowledge among various test groups may cause redundancy between multiple test groups. Further, current test practices do not provide a central location for test results, often leading to lost or misinterpreted results.
Therefore, it would be desirable to provide a centralized system that maintains a shared knowledge database, records history of specific testing practices, and prevents redundancy in testing. It would be also desirable to provide an online product validation system with a remote automated testing capability, which can improve efficiency and reduce ambiguity in testing by performing a set of tasks repeatedly without user intervention.